In the past I would have open sourced code like this, but these days I don’t think it’s worth doing.

Getting the reviews themselves is easy. There’s a JSON object you get when you request the HTML page that you can parse to get the data in a nice clean package. Resolving Google IDs for email addresses at scale is a little harder, but you can find ways to do it.

I’ve done this for some larger email leaks. You can filter out reviews of hotels and other obvious tourist / travel destinations to get a rough sense of where people live.

I have no idea who the fuck “Joe Walsh” is but one of his posts just showed up in my feed and this is incredible levels of Bluesky:

✅ Screenshot of tweet
✅ No alt text
✅ Date cropped off
✅ Attribution also cropped off
✅ Substack in bio

Flunkyball is such a weird part of German culture. I have no problem with teenagers getting drunk in the park at 9:30 on a Monday morning, but there’s always broken glass and they never clean up after themselves.

I know this isn’t anywhere near the worst shit the United States is up to these days, but it’s still just so fucking vile.

EU deforestation law will damage trade with US, Trump official warns European livestock farmers will suffer if the law puts off U.S. producers.

Thinking about this because apparently the fucking Trump administration is trying to bully the EU into killing a new anti-deforestation law.

I grew up in a place without many trees, and as a child my strongest political belief was that anyone who cuts down a tree deserves the death penalty. My priorities have changed, but I don’t think I was entirely wrong.

I left the names and email addresses out of that document intentionally, but it’s still fascinating (to me at least) to click around and see who these assholes are. I guess I should have known there would be so many boomers, for example, but still, kind of surprising.

I pulled Google Maps activity for all of these Proud Boys donors, and almost half (947) are contributors. 398 are Level 3+ Local Guides! Nobody’s made it past Level 7, though.

What a nice little surprise to wake up to on a Saturday morning

I’d never heard of her but she’s a comedian. There’s a Wikipedia page if you’re interested, but I don’t think there’s any reason to be. It’s just another useless resistance account spreading rage bait and misinformation.

If the people sharing it don’t think it’s legit, what’s the point? Filipkowski, etc. are sharing it as if it represents Iranian sentiment. Even if you don’t know that’s it’s actually a Nazi-quoting grifter from Pakistan and just think it’s some rando, why present it as something you know it’s not?

Correction: I misspelled “MeidasTouch” here. Posting this so that it comes up in search if people are looking for examples of Filipkowski and co. sharing misinformation.

There’s no way I can correct misinformation when it’s being spread by accounts with most of a million followers on here.

(I know that Filipkowski himself probably just doesn’t care and understands that his audience is illiterate and incurious enough to repost this shit, but this question still applies to them.)

I just can’t imagine what could possibly be wrong with a person that would make them see an X profile that says “Iran Media” in 2026 and think “clearly this must be a representative of the Iranian media”.

I don’t think this kind of defeatism is useful. Competent moderation could help make the situation better. Dozens of people I respect follow and amplify this fucking Filipkowski asshole. They are part of the problem and are presumably reachable.

The point isn’t the content, which of course is true. It’s that these assholes are uncritically attributing it to Iranian media when it’s from some Nazi-friendly grifter, because they either have zero media literacy or are grifters themselves.

I missed that this X screenshot had also been posted (even more virally) by Ron Filipkowski, the fucking MidasTouch guy. He has 774k followers on here. I hate this place so much.

I know this would be healthier. My problem is that I’m also interested in the state of this place, so I choose to subject myself to this garbage. Someday I’ll figure out that this isn’t necessary and treat Bluesky the same way I do X (sometimes important to monitor, but not to experience directly).

Of course there’s a lot of evidence that it’s true. If you think that amplifying some scammy Nazi-friendly X account helps to make that point, please just block me or at least get the fuck out of my replies.

Respectfully, why would anyone repost something like this? Even if an X account called “Iran News” somehow doesn’t look obviously fake to you, it clearly isn’t some kind of established credible source. What is the point of helping to distribute this?

Every time I open Bluesky I end up spending like 15 minutes just getting angry about US liberals posting misinformation and/or Nazi shit. I’m not going back to X obviously but at least there the assholes working to make the world a shittier place aren’t ostensibly on my side.

I don’t care that this Betty Bowers account is satire. If you’re posting shit like this on a website full of credulous hashtag resistance dipshits you are a part of the disinformation machine. We don’t need this trash.

You can find “Nadira Ali” claiming the backup here. It was using the screen name @/CensoredVIO at the time, but anyone can easily confirm from the user ID (1691380888783986689) that it’s the same account as @/IranMediaNow.

This “Iran News” account is not “Iranian news”, because of course it fucking isn’t. It used to be a backup for “Nadira Ali”, an account that has claimed to be operated from Pakistan and that quotes a neo-Nazi in its header image.

Link you can click to keep your search history clean: www.vice.com/en/article/j...

It’s a misinfo classic. Just google “Jordan Peterson” and any combination of those words.

It’s also weird that they’re always Chinese? It seems like the market should be bigger than one country if they were any good